


trying to see with the rain coming down

by charleybradburies



Category: Original Work, Real Person Fiction
Genre: Based on a True Story, Catholic Character, Catholic Guilt, Catholic School, Catholicism, Character Death, Childhood Trauma, Christian Character, Christianity, Essays, F/F, Gen, Grandparents & Grandchildren, Growing Up, Loss of Parent(s), POV First Person, POV Queer Character, Parent-Child Relationship, Queer Character, Queer Themes, Queer Youth, Real Life, Religion, Religious Conflict, Religious Content, Religious Guilt, Roman Catholicism, Self-Discovery, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:14:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22832359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charleybradburies/pseuds/charleybradburies
Summary: I don't know what I want, so don't ask meCause I'm still trying to figure it outThe story of a kid figuring out their place in this world.Title from Taylor Swift's "A Place in This World".
Relationships: Original Character & Original Character, Original Character(s)/Original Character(s)
Kudos: 1





	trying to see with the rain coming down

**Author's Note:**

> Proper Essay Title: _Catholic Guilt: A Queer Journey Toward Being an Ex-Catholic_.

I'm six the first time I realize my prayers won’t always work, and when I realize that I’m not religious in the way my family is. It’s the first time of many that the faith instilled in me by my mother as well as by hers, my beloved Nonne, a devoted Italian-American Catholic who acted as my third parent during my early childhood, falters. 

My parents are moving us from Michigan to Maryland because my father has found a job in DC; our things are packed into a large U-Haul that my father and my favorite uncle trade off driving south, and my mother and Nonne pull me and our dog Liebchen into our red van. We pull over only when we see the U-Haul has caught fire in the back, and Nonne has us pray while we're sitting there in the shoulder of the highway, in hopes nothing significant is damaged and then in thanksgiving that God's kept all of us from being hurt. She chastises me for asking why God let it catch on fire in the first place.

In Maryland, my parents find a new church for us near our new home. We no longer attend services every week, but when we do, I begin to realize that my father is different from the other adults there; he sings with us, but does not pray, and is not invited to receive communion. He explains when I ask, as he's always been wont to do, and tells me that he's not Catholic; he was baptized and raised in the Episcopal Church. He's sure to say that it’s a church similar to my mother's Catholic Church, but does not keep from also telling me that he has not believed in God enough to pray since the Vietnam War. I get an unexpected historical snapshot of my family and country in asking more about that, too, and reason that my father's political activism are analogous to my mother's religious practices. When I ask why I was baptized Catholic, even though I'm half Catholic and I'm half something else, I'm told I'll understand when I'm older. 

I'm eight when I have my first communion, a festive event that most of my mother's family comes to visit for. The administering priest is visiting, and I use my recollection of the process gained in my sacraments class to guide him through the act of giving me permission to take communion on Sundays, when I don't have outstanding sins for which I still need to atone.

I'm ten when my parents and I choose a Catholic all-girls school for my middle school. The entire idea of going to a private school is strange to me, but my two choices are between one and another, and my mother favors the Catholic school, as it's so like the parochial school she attended through her youth. I’m eleven when I start middle school there, and find myself divided from my peers in most ways a preteen girl can be: my notably short stature, my parents' politics and religious history, my family’s wealth and income, as reflected in my secondhand uniforms and the size of our house, and my intention not to shrug off schoolwork.

By the second week, I realize I have a crush on one of my classmates. She's a lovely combination of many things I am not: tall, blonde, funny, and rich – but is notably, another girl, one who always seems to smell of a very nice Victoria’s Secret perfume I’d never recognize without having known her. Wanting to kiss other girls is encompassed in the list of sins that send people to Hell, so I pretend that if I never mention the butterflies I feel when we sit in desks close to each other, God won't know, and I won’t be punished. 

Halfway through the year, my mother is diagnosed with cancer for the second time in her life; already confined to a body that's weak, she never gets a chance to recover. I'm twelve when I'm driven to school by a beloved neighbor, a Friday morning I'll always picture as rainy in retrospect, so that my father can take my mother to the hospital. He comes to pick me up that afternoon, a more broken man than I can imagine he's ever been, and my headmistress brings me to the school’s parlor so he can inform me that we’ll never get the chance to see my mother alive again. My mother’s friends are baking in our kitchen before we get home; a couple say she’s in a better place, free of pain, and the only answer I get as to why is that it’s up to God to determine when it’s someone’s time. The following week, a priest my mother had never liked performs her funeral, and I focus on the half of the church that’s full of my uniformed schoolmates instead of whatever words he thinks are right to say about a woman he never really knew.

A friend’s family offers to take me to their church with them, and my father and I take them up on that. I go to mass, confession, and Sunday school with them, but I leave my Catholic school at the end of seventh grade. I haven't been at my new school a whole week by the time I have to endure my own romantic notions about another girl, this time one more like me (bookish, opinionated, and on scholarship). It dawns on me, in thoughts never shared, that this inherently sinful path of self-discovery has cursed my family. 

My Nonne is very vocal about wanting me to be confirmed into the Church I share with her and my mother. I go sit through classes that preach fire and blood and brimstone that I have neither the malice to agree with nor the willpower to argue against. I condition myself to feel nauseous every time someone says “God” and “gay” in the same sentence, but I make sure that my grandmother gets her wish.

That winter, I'm thirteen, sitting alone in early morning Sunday mass as the priest prattles on in his sermon. The church smells of incense, salt, and the cold that's crept in from outside, and the imposing, green-clad Father Aaron is somehow making sure that the only legitimately coherent sentences he says are about damnation. He talks about evil in the spirit, about rapists and murderers and other criminals, about heathens of other religions. Eventually, he’s on about people he calls abominations, rebels against God in their queerness, in gender expression that did away with traditions and with romantic or sexual attractions towards people who were of their own sex. I think of the people he's describing, and I'm thinking of a group I've realized I'm a part of - a group doomed to Hell, if he's the godly conduit he's supposed to be. 

I fix my eyes on the largest figure of Jesus in view, the one on the crucifix behind the altar, and I pray for help, for clarity. I focus on the crucifix so hard that my vision of the priest blurs somewhat, even though at some points he physically blocks that view. By the time his sermon is finished, I have the smallest amount of resolution, just as much as I need. Father Aaron cues the congregation to respond, "Amen," and turns his back to us, paying homage to the crucifix I just finished staring at so intently, and I stand. I kneel in the aisle right next to my pew, and waste no time in signing the cross over myself, and then I turn myself around and walk down the aisle, out through the corridor, out to the sidewalk. I take a deep breath, pull out my little pink flip phone, and call the first number on speed dial, my breath shaky and visible in front of me.

"Daddy, I'm done with church. Can you come pick me up, please?"

He says yes, and he shows up in our red van without any further questions, even though I’d called half an hour before we’d planned that I would.

I'm thirteen, and I'm no longer Catholic in the present tense. I'm just a queer kid trying to find a place in this world.


End file.
